Thursday, October 25, 2012

iExamen 2-Haley Pollard

At the start of my second iExamen,
I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. I’ve always had high expectations of
myself when it comes to being courteous to others. This is not to say that I’ve
always remained truthful my whole life. This assignment was a rather difficult
one for me because I found that I really had to stick to the whole ”if you
can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all” mentality. Overall I
experienced some interesting things throughout this iExamen that I found
slightly influenced that way I communicate with others.

Saying kind things has never really
been an issue for me. I like to compliment people just because I know that even
the littlest compliments can turn someone’s crappy day into a happier one. The
real issue that I experienced was when I was forced to say truthful things. I
find that when I communicate with others I’d rather stretch the truth a tiny
bit to make someone feel good about something or themselves, rather than
raining on their parade or kicking them when they’re down with the truth. I
found that the hardest part about being truthful to people was when I knew that
a truthful response would hurt them.
Many girls have body image issues, and I found that the only way I could
avoid the “I hate how huge these pants make my thighs look” or the, “I have the
biggest man-hands in the world” bit, was just to bite my tongue and not say
anything. I’m not the type of person to go along with it and say that someone
should change their outfit because they don’t think they look good. Usually I
would try to convince them that they look beautiful in whatever they’re
wearing. But unless I was feeling truly courageous, I bit my tongue for most of
the day.

Another thing that I found
interesting was that I like to stretch out my stories and make them last a lot
longer than needed. This kind of defied the purpose of the exam because while
observing my iExamen I found myself saying some utterly useless things. When I
wasn’t busy biting my tongue, I would fill in the blanks with random statements,
like “Oh my god I’m so hungry,” or something like, “I can’t believe how much
homework I have to do tonight,” just to fill in the conversation. I found a lot
of these to be incredibly useless and just plain random.

Overall this assignment was an
interesting one. I made my fair share of mistakes and found myself going off
topic and straying from the purpose of the iExamen, but I did learn a thing or
two about myself and the way I interact with others. I felt that I stuck with
the mentality I’ve always had about keeping my mouth shut if I don’t have
something nice or truthful to say, but it turns out that I kept my mouth shut
for most of the day. It would be interesting to see how my behavior changes if
I were to try this iExamen again in the future.